Dances With Wolves (1990)

Review/Film;
A Soldier at One With the Sioux

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: November 9, 1990

KEVIN COSTNER has come a long way after playing the man whose suicide was the peg for "The Big Chill" but whose role was left on the cutting-room floor.

Since then, in "No Way Out," "The Untouchables" and "Bull Durham," he has become a fine, comfortingly old-fashioned Hollywood star. As a screen presence, he has the laconic cool of Gary Cooper and the informed, contemporary sensibility of Robert Redford. The manner is utterly natural, the profile taken from a Roman coin.

From all reports, he's also a foursquare kind of guy.

Now, with "Dances With Wolves," Mr. Costner is the producer and director as well as the star of the kind of rugged frontier adventure that every 10-year-old boy dreams of living, and possibly every actor dreams of re-creating.

"Dances With Wolves" is not a vain endeavor for a first-time director. But when the time comes to sum up the Costner career, the chances are that "Dances With Wolves" will look less like an equivalent to Laurence Olivier's "Henry V" than to Burt Lancaster's "Kentuckian." What breaks through "Dances With Wolves" is not genius but competence.

In most circumstances, that sort of comparison need not be made. It becomes inevitable, though, when the actor is of Mr. Costner's stature and when the film itself is so ambitious.

"Dances With Wolves" has the makings of a great work, one that recalls a variety of literary antecedents, everything from "Robinson Crusoe" and "Walden" to "Tarzan of the Apes." Michael Blake's screenplay touches both on man alone in nature and on the 19th-century white man's assuming his burden among the less privileged.

The time is 1863, during the Civil War. After being cited for bravery in battle, Lieutenant Dunbar (Mr. Costner), a Union officer, requests reassignment to the West, saying he wants to see the frontier before it vanishes. When, finally, he arrives at his post, Fort Sedgewick, in the Great Plains country, he discovers a small abandoned camp.

The exact place is never stated. This is the mythic American West. Because the film was shot largely on magnificent locations in South Dakota, it can be assumed to be the Dakota Territory, where, just a few years later, in 1876, Gen. George Armstrong Custer was to have his fatal encounter with the Sioux in the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

"Dances With Wolves" is by way of being a rationale for the ferocity of the fate that awaited Custer and his men.

In this seemingly unspoiled wilderness, Dunbar sets about to create order in isolation. He assigns himself tasks. He keeps a journal in which he makes notes about the flora and fauna and reports the events of the day, including the appearance of a wolf, whom he names Two Socks for the whiteness of two of his paws.

His is a highly romantic, almost euphoric state of mind, so that when some Indians appear, he embraces their tentative gestures of amity with the enthusiasm of a kid at a super summer camp. It's golly-gee-whiz time.

As trust is given and received, Dunbar enters into the life of this Sioux tribe, whose members have remained startlingly free of contamination by the encroaching American civilization. Dunbar is as entranced by them as they are curious about him and the world he represents.

He learns their language, listens to their folk tales. "They have a gentle humor I enjoy," he writes in his journal. Later, he confides: "It seems every day is a miracle. I've never known a people so eager to laugh and so dedicated to family." He might be reporting for a magazine sold at a checkout counter.

In the tribe is a beautiful young white woman (Mary McDonnell), originally named Christine but now called Stands With a Fist, who was raised by the Sioux after the massacre of her family. One thing leads to another; or, as one kindly Sioux says to his gracious wife, "Has Stands With a Fist found love again?"

Dunbar is so eager to belong that he offers to join his Sioux friends in a war party against some neighboring Pawnees. Only the chief has the good sense to realize that this wouldn't be very good for either Dunbar or the Sioux tribe. Dunbar stays at the camp and becomes a hero when the Pawnees make a sneak attack.

As used to be said in 19th-century parlors, Dunbar goes native.

He also pays a price that is meant to make vivid and tragic the eclipse of one civilization by the cold white light of another.

There's nothing wrong with the shape of "Dances With Wolves" (which is the Sioux name given to Dunbar), or with its sometimes truly spectacular physical production.

After seeing so much urban and suburban squalor in other movies, there is something immensely revivifying about the grand open spaces, the broad horizons, and even the changes in weather in "Dances With Wolves." The movie is like a vacation in the Rockies, but one in which the commonplace keeps obscuring the view.

Mr. Blake's screenplay and Mr. Costner's direction of it are, with the exception of three memorable sequences, commonplace. The film is painstakingly composed of small details of frontier and tribal life that should be riveting.

Most of the time they aren't. Though the details are specific (about, among other things, the Sioux rules for mourning the dead), they are presented in the perfunctory way of generalized statements in guidebooks.

The Civil War battle sequence that opens the film is a beauty. There is another fine, almost Ambrose Bierce-like vignette involving a shell-shocked Union officer Dunbar meets as he is traveling west. The film's buffalo stampede is stunning.

Once Dunbar has taken up with the Sioux and starts strutting around with a feather stuck in his hair, the movie teeters on the edge of Boy's Life literature, that is, on the brink of earnest silliness.

This Sioux camp not only looks as neat as a hausfrau's pin, but also unlived-in. It's a theme-park evocation, without rude odors to offend the sensitive nostril.

Mr. Costner may not be the best person to direct himself. There's nothing wrong with the performance, but another eye might have more effectively surrounded him so that the actor's flat, naturalistic screen behavior wouldn't set the tone for so much of the rest of the film.

"Dances With Wolves" treats the Indians in the cast with respect, and frequently translates their Lakota dialogue with English subtitles.

Of the other actors, the only ones who stand out are Miss McDonnell, a persuasive actress even when dressed in a very fetching Indian frock; Maury Chaykin, who plays the shell-shocked officer, and Robert Pastorelli, who appears as a frontier character whom Dunbar justly describes as "quite possibly the foulest man I've ever met." There's no doubt that he smells to high heaven.

"Dances With Wolves" runs over three hours. Its triumph is that it is never exactly boring, only dulled. It's a movie in acute need of sharpening.

"Dances With Wolves," which has been rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned), has some scenes of graphic violence that might disturb the very young.
Dances With Wolves
Directed by Kevin Costner; written by Michael Blake, based on his novel; director of photography, Dean Selmer; edited by Neil Travis; music by John Barry; production designer, Jeffrey Beecroft; produced by Jim Wilson and Mr. Costner; released by Orion Pictures . Running time: 190 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.